page_title: Rus' people
section_title: Etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Rus' people / Key sources / Etymology
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Europe after the death of Charles the Great (814 AD). Original map made by Charles Colbeck, The Public Schools Historical Atlas (1905).
context_page_description: The Rus' people are generally understood in English-language scholarship as people of Ruthenia. Of the two main origin theories, the "Normanist" places them ancestrally as ethnic Scandinavian people trading and raiding on the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the eighth to eleventh centuries AD, while the "anti-Normanist" theory places their origins in the Slavic region around the Carpathians.
  According to the most prevalent theory, the name Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden, is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row". According to this theory, these Viking-like people basing themselves among Slavs and Volga people in the upper Volga region formed a diaspora of traders and raiders exchanging furs and slaves for silk, silver and other commodities available to the east and south. Around the 9th century, on the river routes to the Black Sea, they played an unclear but significant role in forming the principality of Kievan Rus, gradually assimilating with local Slavic populations. They also extended their operations much further east and south, among the Bulgars and Khazars, on the routes to the Caspian Sea.
context_section_description: The scholarly consensus  is that the Rus' people originated in what is currently coastal eastern Sweden around the eighth century and that their name has the same origin as Roslagen in Sweden (with the older name being Roden). According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (*Ruotsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" (rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and that it could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roslagen (Rus-law) or Roden, as it was known in earlier times. The name Rus' would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi  and Rootsi.
caption: Europe in the 9th century. Roslagen is located along the coast of the northern tip of the pink area marked "Swedes and Goths".
exif: {}